Summary:
Mark Sancrant is back on TAE to talk more about Roll Ups. What they are and what to think about if you are planning to undertake a roll up or being acquired as part of a roll up. Make sure to check out part 1 if you haven’t heard it already https://truthaboutexits.com/tae-ep-15-part-1-roll-ups-mark-sancrant/.
Show notes:
- Planning for transition and integration
- Building a relationship with the seller
- Understanding your employees & creating a culture
- Remote employees
- Being deliberate with your acquisitions
- Bid process
- Keeping to your niche
Article:
Let's move into the operations and integration. You've found the deal, you finance that, you've passed diligence, your team has given you the green light all around and they haven't been just success based. You have pretty good confidence taking over this company. What happens next?
Yeah. I would start thinking about post close. You don't need the start thinking about post close on the day that you saw the sign, the letter of intent. That's probably a little premature. But definitely before you close the transaction, you need to have a good understanding of what is going to happen immediately before the transaction and immediately afterwards. There's a lot that goes into that. Yeah. You may be acquiring a business that has employees, you have a whole lot of potential land mines with making sure that the employees are transitioned over. You may be acquiring some key accounts or clients that you want to make sure that they're on board before you close the transaction. If they are not on board that could change your appetite for the business. There's a whole host of planning and integration work that needs to happen well in advance of the actual close date.
But again, I would think of back to if you already have a business look at the different disciplines within your business and each one of those or a different way of looking at it, think about your work chart and each group had or department head that you have needs to have a seat at the table when it comes time to plan for the transition and the integration. If you have an HR department, they need to be at the table talking to the employees that will be coming over. If you have a development group for instance, they need to understand the code base of the business that you're requiring or whatever it might be. You need to get your team involved in the process as early as possible because at the end of the day, you might be the one making technically making the acquisition but they're the ones that are going to have to live with it. You need them to be involved in the process and feel some ownership and that's just going to help with the overall transition and implementation. I would start with again, developing that team to be involved in putting together a checklist of all the different things that have to happen and I can tell you those checklists can be very long but planning is the key to success here and it's a lot of hard work, but if you don't plan, then the likelihood of you having success is going to be really slim.
That makes total sense. What if those redundancies,what if some of the team you don't need or they're in a different location, what happens or what would you think about on in that case?
Yeah, I would think about being a good steward of the business. When you tell the seller that you're going to be a good steward or whatever word you want to use, it doesn't just mean, hey, we're going to take care of your clients. When the business is done it means we're going to take care of the brand that you build. We're going to take care of your clients, we're going to take care of your employees. There are always going to be situations where there's an employee or two or more that don't fit into the overall plan. I would try to have those conversations as early as possible with the owner and I would also do my best to make sure that the employees that might be affected have as soft as a landing as possible. That's not necessarily your responsibility as the buyer but I think it goes a long way when you show that you care to the seller.
I've also seen situations where sellers are attached to their employees and if they find out one of their employees is going to be affected, it might cause them to say, I know I don't want to do the deal. Again, having these conversations as early as possible and making sure that you're doing the right thing for your business, the right thing for their business and at the end of the day is also the right thing and being as good of a person as you can to those people impacted. I think that's the right approach.
Absolutely. I guess this goes back to the earlier comment of not changing anything for about the first year because you don't really know what those key employees could really be doing. Well maybe even who the key employees are it may take some time to figure out who those people are, right?
That's absolutely right, absolutely right. In some situations it's going to be pretty apparent that we don't need two people doing accounts payable for instance. It might appear that there's a redundancy there, but maybe that person is more qualified or maybe there's a different role for that person. But until you really start to understand who the people are and what their roles are and again talking to the seller you've got to have open conversations.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. You just never know.
You brought up a good point there of they might be a good fit for another role. It's expensive to go out and find new employees. If you've got an employee base instead of going through and firing really fast, maybe look at how else you could use that asset because every employee is an asset, whether they're really a liability or not you need to figure it out. But for the most part people are a big asset to the business. Interesting to think through that. Would you have any structure of, is that timelines that you would use 30 60 90 day plans for taking over the business or does it depend on the business?
No, I think you should always have a 30 60 90 day plan and not only kind of an internal 30 60 90 day plan but also more of an external one that you share with the company that you're acquiring. Here's where I'm going with that. The one thing we haven't talked about and now that we're kind of talking about employee or headcount kind of conversations, one of the most important things and usually it's the thing that can kill the success of a transaction faster than anything else is culture. You've got to think about the transition and integration from a culture standpoint just as much as you do financial or anything else. It's really important and it's kind of funny all through my education, every time I saw the word like mission statement or value statement or whatever you want to call them, I always thought why does anyone actually spend time working on those?
You're thinking about them because at the end of the day they don't really matter. Until I got involved in M&A and I realized they're not just words. If the company actually lives by it whatever their mission statement is or strives to be that kind of company that's important. You have to start sharing that with the target company as early as possible to start helping them understand who you are and how you work and what life is going to look like when they're part of your organization. I think my point being that it's worth spending a lot of time thinking about what your culture is and how you operate and what that means for the people coming over that might be operating under a totally different corporate culture. You can't make their culture fit yours and you can't change your culture to accommodate.
There's cultures are kind of what they are and they take time to change. But what you can do is be very transparent and upfront about this is our culture and this is how we work and make sure that everyone understands that on day one. Again, I would spend a lot of time with individual employees or having your department heads talked to the people that are going to be reporting to them to make sure that they understand their own department culture. Spending a lot of time on culture is probably one of the areas that I think is the easiest kind of glance over and not really spend a lot of time on. But it's probably one of the more important ones, particularly when there are people involved.
Absolutely. Yeah. I used to cringe when I started working at very large corporations and that was culture and mission statements and all this type of thing. It really didn't resonate until I started traveling and it wasn't necessarily just the foreign culture foreign things that were happening in different countries. It was more of the people, the ex pats I was meeting because if I found someone from the same area of Australia as me from Brisbane, we would have something in common immediately. The same was true with if you've been to the same college or done the same degree. There's all these things that make you similar and there's almost an unwritten understanding immediately when you meet people that are from a similar culture.I guess that's where it really comes from, right? This is more of a country or a background culture. I feel culture is a certain way, it's important to make sure that that's understandable or explained before integrating. You often see this in really large companies but I couldn't work in small to medium enterprises as well. Especially if you're integrating more staff more head count into your company.
Yup, absolutely. Awesome. As you were saying that, it made me think through some of the organizations that I've worked for. Yeah. On your first day they would make you fill out a questionnaire about five things list your five hobbies and things that where did you travel last summer, whatever they were. I always kind of went into it again with that attitude of not understanding why they're making me fill out this silly thing that has absolutely nothing to do with my role. But it's exactly what you just said. It's I say I spent my summer in wherever, not very exciting place, right? There might be somebody else in the organization that grew up there or some went on summer vacation there too. It's those little bonds that once you start identifying and allowing people to connect, that's really what starts to drive your culture.
Again, you can't force your culture on somebody else and you can't change your culture to accommodate somebody else. But what you can do is make them feel a little bit more comfortable. Then they'll start to work into the culture. I think that those little things, facilities they can be great tools to just start identify those commonalities between people to help them start to feel like they fit in. The other piece to that I would say and this is more for kind of more of the management level types, I would also think about using different assessment, kind of like the old school Briggs Meyer personality tests. But again this is where as I've gotten older and understood these little bit more, I see what the true value is. They're not about assessing someone to figure out whether or not they're going to be a fit.
But as a business owner or a manager of people, the more I understand who my employees are and how they work is going to allow me to be a better manager. There's one in particular called the disc assessment. It's d, I s c. The tool does is allows you to understand what motivates people, what kind of personality they are. It helps you as a manager know how to get the most out of them that you possibly can. Again, it's not about do they fit within my organization, it's about what tools do I need as a manager to help them do their job. I would also look at things like that.
Absolutely. I read a book last year called Principles by Ray Dalio. Have you read this book?
No I haven't.
Yeah. He goes pretty deep into his baseball card is what they call it at a Bridgewater. Yeah. Bridgewater is his hedge Fund. If you want more information on that's a pretty good read. I picked it up on audible. It's a really good listen. Then I got the book cause it's a great reference point when it comes to corporate fit or personality fit to positions. They take it a step further where they have these baseball cards what people's strengths and weaknesses are. Literally in meetings they will default to the person with the most experience. They'll listen to everyone's opinion but they'll default to the person with the most experience in that said topic, which is useful. It's not 100% anyone has a say but it's weighted. The opinions are weighted, which I thought was really interesting. That could be something as part of an acquisition that could be really interesting to find some amazing industry knowledge that you didn't have before that comes across in the staff. You might be thinking at this point we talking about M&A shouldn't this be all about financials. Well as you and I have ripped many times since we first met, a lot of this stuff is really psychology, right? People are the biggest piece of whether something is a good fit or not.
Yeah. I have one more topic to touch on that relates to this. Just with the where our world is today, It's going to be nearly impossible to acquire anything where there's not a remote employee involved. More and more of us are working from home and lots of companies really don't care where you live. They want to make sure they get the right person for the role. If that person is on the other side of the world, so be it. The reason I bring that up is because that creates a whole different cultural issue. That person's not going to be in the office and interacting with everyone else. But how do you make sure that that person starts to get assimilated into the business or into the corporate culture? You need to make them feel like they're part of the team just like everyone else.
That's when this gets into a whole different subject but kind of more on the operational side of how some best practices of how to run a business. But you need to start thinking about things like all hands meetings where everyone comes together on a set cadence, whether it's once a month or some other time frame and you just talk about how the business is doing or weekly meetings and one on one meetings. You need to figure out some way to make sure that those remote people feel valuable and that they're actually part of a company. I just wanted to bring that last piece up around culture.
Absolutely. Yeah. If you are taking on remote employees and you've not dealt with remote people before and maybe spend some time talking to people that do run teams like that, there's all sorts of risks and opportunities that remote work brings up. It's not all perfect and it's not all horrible either. It depends on your company that remembering that that remote worker has much less visibility into the business, it is probably the first step.
Personally what we do is we have a team retreats, we work together. We all catch up in one place and, and we work together on a fairly frequent basis about quarterly, not exactly that, about quarterly. A lot of the companies I know that have a ton of remote workers do something similar. Yeah, that can help. But definitely go read up on that. You could really deep dive on that for quite some time but that would be time well spent I think. Okay. Well this one I think we will definitely a split this episode into, but we do have one more piece to talk about is the exit. If you do successfully do a roll up strategy, you build everything together, you've got the culture right, the people where they need to be and you want to go and take advantage of the multiple arbitrage that you've just created. What's next or is that more on the operations before we get into the actual exit side of things?
Yeah, I think the thing is time to talk about the exit.
Excellent. Well this is where everyone becomes billionaires right?
Yeah, exactly. No, it's kind of interesting because most people don't think about the exit until they're ready to exit. This could be a whole another hour long conversation as well. But I think about the exit day one. The main reason is you set the strategy up around why I'm going to do a roll up or consolidation or a buy and build whatever it is that you want to call it. But it probably makes sense to before you dive into that to at least have a short conversation with yourself around, I want to create something that has value to somebody else at some point. You need to think about how to build the business in such a way that it's going to have value to someone else.I think about that process again on day one and all along it's not something I just think about when we hit the artificial timeline that we set for when we're going to exit.
Part of that process goes back to relationship building. As I said before in prior companies I always thought about who is the most likely company that we can exit to and who is most likely going to pay us a premi price. I started reaching out to those companies three or four years before we were ready to sell. My goal at that point in time wasn't to get them buy us it was really just to develop that relationship. When it did come time for us to sell, they already knew who we were. I was on their radar screen, they knew a little bit about our business and it just made the process a lot easier. That's one piece that I would, think about that the exit just isn't what you do right before you sell the business to exit at some levels should be in the back of your mind, the entire bill business building process.
Absolutely. Okay maybe if you could you talk a little bit through your exit of I-net Interactive ? Yeah cause we've talked about this a couple of times that kind of was pretty interesting how you guys were acquiring, putting the business together and then went through the process. Yeah, just a little bit of background. Irnet was a special interest media company. We were started off purely online and a number of forums and directories all geared towards a niche technology markets like web development and web posting. We developed an acquisition strategy to start building onto the pieces that we had. We moved into affiliate marketing, we moved into the data centers, a couple other areas, other developer resources. We not only use acquisitions to expand what markets we were in but we also moved into conferences and trade shows. We added new capabilities via acquisition as well.
We were pretty deliberate with what things we would look to acquire. It had to be something where we either already had a core competency in new, once we made the acquisition that we would be able to positively impact that target or if we were acquiring a new capability, we had to feel really strong about the team that we're acquiring around that new capabilities. Again we were very deliberate and with our process over a five year period, we acquired nine businesses. Technically probably more like 12 but a few of them were pretty small. But we grew the company, I think I was employee number nine and when we exited we grew to about 55 employees. We had to get really strong with cultural integration. We went from a very small entrepreneurial family company to yeah not a big company by any means of 55 people.
But it certainly felt more like a bureaucracy by the time we exited than it once did. Throughout that process, I was always thinking about the exit and we knew that for us to have a successful exit, we needed to hit a certain size to be of appeal to the larger buyers, more strategic buyers. We also knew that we had to continue to keep a pretty tight focus. Again, we were in niche technology markets. It wouldn't have made sense for us to go acquire a media property that was focused on fashion for instance. Right. Cause the likely buyer of us was going to have an interest in technology. They weren't going to be interested in technology and fashion. We were again just very specific about what areas we would move into. We were very disciplined on what we would pay. Ultimately that resulted in a very nice exit for us to a strategic buyer that identified the markets that we were in is a kind of core to their vision. At the end of the day I'd say we got a bit of scarcity premi. What I mean by that is we pretty much owned the web hosting and data center markets. If anyone wanted to move into those markets, the only way they could was really by acquiring us. It was a pretty good position for us to be in.
You'd built a pretty significant moat of our acquisitions and growing intentionally. One of the most interesting pieces about this story that we've talked about before is that despite you were spending a good couple of years meeting strategics in the space, you still went for a traditional sales process with an investment bank. The ones that you were talking to didn't actually end up being the buyer or the acquirers at the other end. Could you talk through why the company decided to go for a sale process, what that looked like and then a little bit about that acquisition if you can?
Yeah, absolutely. First and foremost and I'm partially saying all this in self serving manner but personally not it's just a lot easier to have an advisor or an investment bank to run a process for you. It ensures things stay on track. It ensures that you're able to remain as unbiased as possible about assessing that the deal, it's nice to have a buffer and it's also nice to have some mystery I guess to the process. What I mean by that is if I were to just reached out to one of the strategics that we thought was kind of going to be the buyer and dealt directly with them they have all the negotiating leverage rate. If they're the only ones that are at the table. When you have multiple parties at the table it's kind of like the lending tree commercial when banks compete, you win. Well, when you have more than one buyer at the table, the seller's going to win. It was important for us to have outside investors. It was important to us to ensure that we're maximizing value and we felt that the way to make sure that we were able to maximize values to have an investment bank and run a traditional auction process and it was a very smooth process. I think if we would've tried to go it alone, I think it would not have resulted in the transaction that we had.
With an auction process, could you talk through just what that means and was there a set timeline to that?
Yeah in conjunction with us our Investment Bank put together a list of, oh, it was probably 160 to 180 prospective buyers and we set a I believe it was a two or three week time frame. The investment bank reached out to all of those parties with a little bit of information about the company with instructions on when they could submit an initial indication of interest. Once those indications for received, then we would select the parties that would move forward to the next round and the next round entailed being able to do more a much deeper level of due diligence on us at which point the remaining parties would submit a bid and then we would take the bid and then transact with that winner of the auction if you will.
It creates a level playing field but also creates a timeline. We've just finished a 21 day process on a deal last week actually. It was interesting that a lot of those interested parties kind of waited till the last minute but they were all very aware of what that timeline was. Partially through us reminding them but also that whole cycle really works it seems like artificial timelines but sometimes that's the way to get people moving. I had call, the podcasts that I just recorded before yours was with Chris rollings from Judolaunch and he was saying he did the same thing when he was raising capital from VCs. He said you always need to have the timeline in mind, otherwise people just won't act. I think that's just general human nature.
Yeah. You don't make decisions, especially hard decisions until you absolutely have to. There's no question about it.
I think another piece of this puzzle is to really be able to run an auction process like we're talking about here. You need to be a certain size and you need to be in a position to be appealing to the types of firms that are used to being involved in a process. If you're on a process on a deal that's too small, you could actually scare off a lot of the buyers. I'm speaking from experience here. If the deal is too small and this is out of step with the market. This is really for lower middle market deals let's say 10 to 50 million plus in revenue is really where this starts to become the norm.
Yeah, and I would look at it you're absolutely right there. There's a size threshold that I would also just look at it, who the likely buyers are? If you can't say who the likely buyer of your business is then you probably shouldn't be in an auction. I mean it's pretty simple obviously cause the investment banker, M&A advisors going to have to reach out to parties. But it's a very proactive process and if you can't develop a prospective buyer list and know that those parties, there's something about your business that they would find attractive than yeah. Than it doesn't make sense to have an auction. You're absolutely right.
Absolutely. How do you think as probably more with the advisor advisor hat back on, how do you think about financial versus strategic and what do those two terms mean to you?
I mean less and less it seems like each year that goes by. Historically it was believed that strategic buyers would pay premiums or be able to pay more than financial buyers. For the most part, that's still true. The reason is because they already have operations. There might be some redundancies or some cost savings that the strategic buyer has that the financial buyer doesn't which allows them to pay more and still generate a comparable IRR. But the reality is financial buyers are increasingly acting like strategic buyers. What I mean by that is we started this conversation off talking about rollups. If you look at the playbook of a lot of PE firms, it's let's identify a platform business and then do everything we can do to support the growth of that platform, whether it's organic growth or inorganic growth via acquisitions.
While a financial buyer might technically not, might not be as strategic buyer they might be transacting with you on behalf of a portfolio company, which makes them more of a strategic buyer that that's one piece. The second piece is the reality is private equity firms are sitting on a ton of cash that has to be deployed before the end of their limited partnership where they have to return capital to their investors, they need to deploy the cash. If that means they have to be more competitive with their pricing then that means they have to be more competitive. What you've kind of seen over the past several years is there's not a huge disparity between financial buyers and strategic buyers but there still is a little bit of one.
Absolutely. I'm just going to play novice here and just translate a couple of these terms we've been talking about number one is IRR. If you're not in the investing world internal rate of return is what that is. You can Google that later. But this is return on capital right? Internally. That's what investors used to value or to project forward what their return on capital should be. That's a really important term. Dig into that in your own time. But the next couple of pieces I'd like to explain this financial and strategic. Typically a financial buyer is a buyer motivated by the numbers essentially. You also mentioned platform. I'm going to explain those to and then we'll get into strategic. A financial buyer for the most part could be a private equity group. Mark has a fund with cash to deploy in a certain period of time. Now where the platform piece comes in could actually take that financial buyer and make them more strategic. Now platform is a certain size deal that they start with. I actually met with a private equity fund here in Austin. They started with a services company in a certain niche and that was that platform. They found a business that was big enough with enough infrastructure that they can then go and make add on acquisitions that just actually closed add on acquisition for this company when we met up. That was the roll up strategy is looking for a platform piece. First it was a vertical in the service industry and then they could add on to that business and then they were looking for more platform deals. This company being a private equity group is both financial as an overall they could look at multiple different industries. But then if it is an add on acquisition for that platform that may actually make them more of a strategic buyer, which means they have synergies in that space they could bring that unfair advantage we were talking about earlier is really what we think of when we say strategic. Both Mark and I have worked on a deal where we found a strategic that would actually pay less than financial wise on a deal much less. It's not always the silver lining that you think it could be.
Nah, man at the end of the day everyone, I spent a lot of time talking about discipline and even strategics have discipline and there's not a way to argue that it is.
Also just to close out the loop on translating some of the terms here you mentioned portfolio company. Once the business was acquired by a private equity firm that's referred to as a portfolio company. That company, if it's owned by a private equity group is somewhat strategic and somewhat financial. That really blends the lines that as to what acquirer you would prefer. But what I agree with you, it's not any more, it's not really just strategics that you'd prefer to go with. In some cases a financial, somewhat strategic buyer may want you out of the deal quicker and that may actually align with your goals as the seller.
Absolutely right, absolutely right.
Cool. Okay. And what else would you think of when it comes to exiting a business, before going to exit the business?
I guess I can't say it enough. Just the planning that should go into it. Again, it's not planning three months in advance. It's planning when you start your business or it's planning from the day that you acquire a business. There's just a lot of lot to think through about how to create value part of that operationally. But it's also making sure that you're creating an asset that someone else wants to acquire. There's a lot that you can do throughout however many years you own a business to prepare for that exit. It's one piece that I think the advisory community could do a better job on with educating business owners on some of the things that they can do to maximize your value. But the reality is lots of people don't do any sort of exit planning. I'm going to say this somewhat facetiously but not really. People spend more time preparing to sell their houses than they do their business. I would challenge any business owner listening to really think through how they're going to maximize the value of their company. It's not just about the operational pieces it's about preparing for that final exit.
Absolutely. To stay on theme because I know we'll have many more discussions around exit planning in general but if you have done a roll up you touched on this before with I-net Interactive, you guys weren't looking at any type of web property, you are staying niche to tech related stuff and you were thinking about who would want to acquire this business. It's quite easy to think, well maybe easier because if you're not going with a vertical approach if you're just picking up whatever business you find and putting them together with operations, that may be easier to find because like we mentioned before brokers, investment bankers will have lists of businesses that they're marketing and you could easily pick up a few of these if the numbers made sense. But then on the other side, if you're looking to maximize value and you're doing a roll up strategy, you may want to stay really niche specific or vertical specific to make sure you appeal to that next level of buyer. I think that's probably the most crucial piece is figuring out who's likely to value the business. Then obviously when there's the time to start going to market.
Absolutely. That process isn't always easy, right? Sometimes you have to make some really hard decisions. While we were very disciplined with our overall approach to markets halfway into our life cycle if you will, we made the decision to move into conferences and trade shows. That was a hard decision to make because we knew going into that once we added a live event, that the pure play online media companies that were out there were no longer going to have an interest in us because now we have these events. But we also knew that there were a lot of media companies that were moving into the event space and yeah we would lose some perspective buyers but we might gain some others. That was one piece of it. But the second piece was it just made a lot of business sense.
Sometimes, even though I just said everything I've said about preparing, sometimes you need to live in today and do what's right for the business today and not purely focus on the exit. But for us there were many synergies between having an online media property and an events that was very closely connected. It made total business sense for us today and we believed would make business sense for us at the exit. Little did we know that ad technology was going to come along and make it very difficult for online media companies. We lost a lot of the competitive advantage that we had as a result of ad tech, but it was these events that kind of really kept a lot of the value in the business. We absolutely made the right decision. I don't think we made or I'm sorry, we made the right decision. I don't think we knew why that was the right decision for this reason at the time. But it turned out to work for us. But yeah you have got to think about the future and make sure you're building an asset that someone else is going to want.
Awesome.I think that's been a great conversation on rollups. Is there anything that I haven't asked you that I should have asked or anything else you'd like to add as a final thought on rollups I had thought about just some of the throughout the conversation we talked a little bit about some of the challenges. I think we covered the benefits pretty well using acquisitions to supplement or augment organic growth as long as there's purpose and discipline behind it. I think it makes a lot of sense from the challenges standpoint there are definitely a lot of challenges that we talked about. One is you're running a business already to start undertaking. Acquisitions is very time consuming.I think about the team, whether it's hiring someone internal to focus on acquisitions or looking to an advisor to help you with developing a buy side strategy. I think that's important. Making sure that you have proprietary deal flow and aren't just purely looking opportunistically.
The more you look at deal flow, the more you're going to learn about what is going to be a good fit and what isn't. Then the secondary piece to that and it might be more important though is the more deals you do the better you get at doing deals. You learn very quickly about mistakes made in prior deals. That is kind of the core to earlier I mentioned something like 75% of all M&A fails. The companies that have success with M&A are serial acquirers, they're doing it on a fairly consistent basis. They have a process around it they know exactly what to do around integration and culture and everything else we've talked about. I would think about that also. Then we talked a lot about not being afraid to say no , you've got to do the right deals for the right reasons.
Otherwise if you're doing deals just to get deals done, you're probably going to lose. You have to be patient integration is a piece to success within M&A. Focusing on culture and staff and selling the vision is all important. Size, we didn't get a whole talking a whole lot about size but I've also seen a lot of situations where companies make much larger acquisitions and maybe they should and they perverted. It's kind of, they bite off more than they could chew.I think about that piece. Lastly I guess the last guidance I would give and we talked about this a little bit is just making changes too fast. Again, you gotta ease into it and on day one you have to sit back and kind of understand what you bought before you start tinkering around with things. Once you do start tinkering around, make sure that you can kind of project what the result is going to be and make sure that if you turn a knob or pull a lever and things don't work out the way you thought that they were going to be that you can quickly adjust it back to where it was. I think from the challenges standpoint and just general advice, I think that's kind of how I would s up the conversation today.
Awesome. Well Mark, this has been super helpful. I've enjoyed this conversation as always. We've actually got two new things that we do at the end of each podcast. Number one is do you have any books that you would recommend or other resources related to roll ups that you would recommend people read?
Well, not specifically. I think any book around people I would focus more on the people behind roll ups as opposed to stories about the actual deals or finance type books. Because I think the people that have had success with rollups, it's not that their financial wizards or they have a really good deal teams. It's they had a really good vision. Any book about a business leader that talks about their vision and how they implemented their vision. I think that's probably where I would start.
Awesome. Okay. I would recommend checking out. I love Capitalism from Ken Lynn going, he talks a little bit about this. He was an investment banker and became co founder of Home Depot and a bunch of other companies.yeah. Awesome book. I love that. Also when you mentioned acquiring a larger company, it made me think of the Fish that ate the whale. I'm blanking on the author's name but that's also an interesting story around that.that's cool. Instead of saying how people can reach out to you and ask for more help because you've been very open with your advice here, how can people help you? What do you need help with?
I like to talk to people even if there's ever anything you want to talk about, I would say reach out to me. Again, I'm about building relationships and I'm a believer of karma even if you don't need help and I don't need help from you that doesn't mean we shouldn't chat. I like building relationships and adding to my network and I invest a lot of time in both of those pieces. I'm a firm believer that I might meet someone today and maybe we don't do anything for 20 years. That's okay. It had to start someplace. I guess the way you can help me out is introduce yourself to me and then let's talk about baseball or something else and then maybe we'll end up doing something work related.
I love that. How is the best way to reach out to you? We'll put it in the show notes.
Yeah, I would say linkedin again, Mark Sancrant probably the easiest way or just email me directly. You can reach me at mark with a k [email protected]
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for jumping back on the show, mate. We're planning many more conversations, but this has been awesome. Yeah.
Same here Coran I appreciate it.
Cool. Thanks mate. Thank you.